Workshop Discussion

Unnatural States: Interdisciplinary History

and African Savannah “Game Reserves”

David Bunn (University of Chicago, University of Johannesburg)

This is not a formal paper. Rather, it is a series of loose meditations on the

state of interdisciplinarity in environmental history, as it is being applied
to the study of protected areas in African savannahs. These are thoughts
that arise from the general theory underlying the book I am writing,
entitled An Unnatural State: Boundary Identities in South Africa’s Kruger
National Park.

What follows, in other words, is a patchwork of sections of old papers, with

bits of new drafts, and many loose thoughts. There are no footnotes, and
many of the figures are missing. As a whole, the document is meant to
facilitate discussion, and I am trusting participants to treat this as an
agenda for the debate only. More detailed, and footnoted discussions may
be found in a sequence of my recently published papers.

I have attempted to set out some sample propositions about the interdisciplinary
study of protected areas in Africa, with a close focus on South Africa’s Kruger
National Park. These are points for discussion, and they represent aporias in my
own argument, interesting problems of method that I think deserve our close
attention. It should be noted too that these concerns spring quite narrowly from
my “field” experience in the Kruger National Park and adjacent community areas
in rural Limpopo Province, where I have been working for about twelve years.
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1. On Method
In a very useful overview of the current condition of environmental history in
Africa, Jane Carruthers--herself a prominent historian of protected areas-- speaks
about major new trends driving interdisciplinarity. Like mine, her perspective is
mainly that of a South African historian seeking alliances with African and world
environmental theory. She begins by asserting an old argument about the
“exceptional “nature of the South African case: that South Africa, as a more
industrialized country, does not fit that easily into the received genealogy of
colonial environmental practice, which depended on a far closer association
between settler agriculture and indigenous pastoralism. Secondly, South African
environmental history has a far stronger activist emphasis, she claims, and this
continues to determine its unique character.

Carruthers goes on to talk about other general trends in the field: the
realignment (or “Africanization”) of South African environmental history with
work done elsewhere on the continent; the increasing importance of heritage
discourses in the understanding of protected areas; and a radically transformed
conception of local agency, of transnational influences, of nationhood, and of
animals. Like Beinart and others, Carruthers believes in the struggle to free
environmental theory from its tendency to perpetuate narratives of dependency,
and the need to establish instead a long history of African environmental
practice. This puts her sharply at odds, she thinks, with what she characterizes as
certain post-structuralist tendencies.i

I share some of these concerns. Nonetheless, I want to propose a rather different

set of approaches, approaches that are informed by critical theory and by
developments in cultural anthropology.

My central concern is with the further development of comparative perspectives

on protected areas in savanna biomes. Because of the focus of my fieldwork, the
Kruger National Park will continue to be the horizon against which I see
changing theoretical methods playing out.
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In 1999 I was a participant in the influential conference on African environments

held at St Anthony’s College, Oxford , organized by William Beinart. Many of the
major themes of that conference, and the book that followed, have been taken up
by Beinart and a new generation of environmental historians. ii But the debate
around interdisciplinarity and comparative history still tends to be haunted by
old charges: Ranger’s admonition, for instance, that South African environmental
history is too influenced by the comparative settler dimension, and that in
general there is too much emphasis on the agency of the colonial state, not
enough on African land use, and too much romanticizing of local or indigenous
African use of resources, in a way that masks the self-serving alliances of local
elites.

Beinart ends one review article (in Dovers and Edgecombe) with the following
warning: “Neither the comparative settler nor comparative African
historiography has yet fully come to terms with an ecological history in which
the dynamics of environmental change form a significant focus” (229). This is a
still a profoundly important correction. Think, for instance, of the significance of
current research into global climate change for a fuller understanding of the
history of resource contestations, or of contemporary research based in the
analysis of “ecosystem services” for the comparative history of environmental
values in local communities over time. Unfortunately, instead of allowing for this
convergence, there been a tendency in some environmental historians to
juxtapose the “soft” histories based in anthropology or cultural studies against
the “harder” biological perspectives on ecosystem functioning over time.

Bearing this in mind, what I propose to do now is to take a few major themes that
have been at the heart of recent attempts to write interdisciplinary histories of
protected areas in Africa. These are also themes that have been preoccupying me
over the past few years, and which form part of the armature of the book I am
writing. They are all, to a lesser or greater degree, topics that combine reference
to multiple archives and multiple disciplines, ranging from conservation biology
to heritage studies to protected area management theory. They include, amongst
others, for the purposes of this very loose discussion:
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 conceptions of space, landscape, and the “national imaginary” in

national parks in Africa;
 modernity, neurasthenics, gender, and the tourist understanding of
“therapeutic” savanna wildernesses;
 the systematic connection between “game reserves” and other heritage
institutions;
 the ontology of borders, and fences, and the history of movement;
 the philosophical and political meaning of “top-down” drivers of savanna
systems such as fire;
 the general comparative analysis of protected area management
systems

2. On Protected Areas As “National Landscapes”

About a decade ago, there was a long and intriguing debate around Kruger and
other National Parks as exemplary of certain limited forms of white settler
nationhood. Amongst others. Isabel Hofmeyr, Jane Carruthers, Comaroff and
Comaroff, Rasool and Witz, and myself all wrote at length on these connections.
Though it’s probably not fair of me to subject their early work to such close
scrutiny, Rasool and Witz were concerned to show how critical game reserves
are for the development of neo-liberal tourist economies:
The international ecotourist is not on safari merely for hedonistic reasons.
Today he wants to be sure that he has left his mark and has contributed to
preserving the environment and benefitting the nation. Through shooting
images of wildlife, the international ecotourist almost naturally becomes a
'promoter' of environmental awareness,' provider' of job and trade
opportunities for rural communities and the 'panacea for South Africa's
foreign exchange woes.

Game reserves, they argue, in this symptomatic reading of the post-apartheid

economy, allow for a staging of the principle of “unity in diversity” which is a
cornerstone of the post-apartheid state.
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Similar symptomatic readings may be found in the literature on Maasai identity

and safari tourism in East Africa. In a widely cited article, Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett and Edward Bruner examined a species of tourist entertainment in
Kenya that references the iconic, postcard landscapes of Maasai herders. At the
Mayers Ranch, she explains, “The tourists control the wild through photography
and derive pleasurable, even libidinous, excitement from photographing the
Maasai” (455). Studies like these seem very dated now, but the extremely crude
“gaze theory” they use- derived from the popular Lacanianism of Urry’s tourism
studies--was ubiquitous for a whole generation.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s analysis of the instrumentalizing tourist gaze does not

provide us with many insights into the relationship between Kenyan “game
reserve” landscapes and the national Imaginary. That aside, the article does come
to one very persuasive conclusion: “both the Maasai and the Mayers,” they argue,
“get essentially the same thing from tourism—the ability to maintain a contested,
some might say . . . even reactionary, lifestyle in contemporary Kenya. . . . The
Maasai and the Mayers are in business together” (467).

This is an important conclusion. It registers the fact that this mise en scene plays
out a drama and an investment that has everything to do with the imagining of
time in relation to the developmental state in Kenya. To understand the
relationship between the State, and the “state of nature,” one is obliged, it seems,
to return to the temporalising and enframing effects, which position pastoralists
against the backdrop of the savanna.

Yet the problem with this entire generation of writings based in an anthropology
of tourism is its extremely weak theoretical base. To compare the work, say of
Dorothy Hodson with the banal symptomatic readings by Lutz and Collins
(Reading National Geographic) of savanna game reserves is to despair altogether
of ever using the term “gaze” again.iii A host of other works, on the presence of
nomads, or pastoralists, in dry and wet savanna protected areas, from the
Kalahari to Zambia, built their arguments on highly simplified versions of the
instrumentalising camera.iv
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I do not want to dismiss this generation of interdisciplinary histories completely,

for fear that we will think tourism studies added nothing to the study of the
“game reserve” figure. Some important perceptions came out of this work. What
gets lost in the welter of articles of the same type, however, are the few very
carefully considered close studies of landscape effects. Moreover, it would be
premature, on the basis of some of these dead ends encountered in the past
decade, give up altogether the theoretical connection between game reserves
and the idea of national landscape.

I still find the notion of “national” landscapes very useful in the study of game
reserve histories and the State. However, I find myself increasingly turning away
from work emerging from environmental studies, and towards current trends in
cultural anthropology and heritage. My own study of time and space in game
reserves has been heavily influenced, over decades, by Nancy Munn, and by work
on the relationship between ethnicity, space, memory, and the state, in people
like Danilyn Rutherford (on Indonesia), Ann Stoler (on Dutch colonial circuits of
exchange) or Roz Morris (on Thailand). Most significantly, too, it has led me into
a long engagement with the work of John and Jean Comaroff, and a line of
argument around neo-liberalism, tourism, and contemporary South African
“nature” in the seminal paper “Naturing the Nation”.

3. On Game Reserve Kinaesthetics, and The Temporalities of Modernism

Game reserves are often also “landscapes” in that they reserve particular forms
of space, time, framing, and aesthetic investment for a narrow class of visitor.
They might productively then be seen as works of cultural modernism,
participating both in the local discourses of nationhood and in the wider
therapeutic rhetoric of metropolitan modernism. That is to say, what is being
strived for, in protected areas in Africa, is a model space of nature, which is to say
a space purged of politics, which reproduces an older order of time and labor.
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Game reserves, in this species of theoretical understanding, are useful vehicles

for the “naturalization” of wider ideological principles. Such effects are very well
described by Zizek:

Let's recall Walter Benjamin's notion of "natural history" as "re-

naturalized history": it takes place when historical artifacts lose their
meaningful vitality and are perceived as dead objects, reclaimed by nature
or, in the best case, as monuments of a past dead culture. . . . The
paradox here is that this re-naturalization overlaps with its opposite, with
de-naturalization. Since culture is for us humans our "second nature,"
since we dwell in a living culture, experiencing it as our natural habitat,
the re-naturalization of cultural artifacts equals their de-naturalization.
Deprived of their function within a living totality of meaning, artifacts
dwell in an inter-space between nature and culture, between life and
death, leading a ghost-like existence, belonging neither to nature nor to
culture.

I have pursued this theme--that of the African savannah game reserve and its co-
implication in the work of early twentieth century modernism-- in a variety of
different ways. Most usefully, game reserves could be seen to function as spatial
machines that “smooth out” the destructive cycles of modernism.

Let’s begin by thinking back on Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro”.

Harry, we recall, in Hemingway’s story, thinks of Africa as a place to return to to

“work the fat off [the] soul”. As such, the East African landscape fulfills a primary
function that is common in modernism: it embodies a proximity to the primal
unconscious, a raw source that provides an alternative to the alienating
conditions of urban modernity.

In “Snows,” the therapeutic effects are associated specifically with ability to see
savannahs as landscapes, and the animals within them as fundamentally adapted
to their environmental niches. Harry’s famously castrating wound, for instance,
occurs
when a thorn had scratched his
knee as they moved forward trying to photograph a herd
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of waterbuck standing, their heads up, peering while their

nostrils searched the air, their ears spread wide to hear the
first noise that would send them rushing into the bush.
They had bolted, too, before he got the picture.

By the end of the story, the savannah landscape has once again become woven
into the dying Harry’s desire. In the final death hallucination, he is lifted out of
the company of women, by an old, settler colonial comrade flying an ancient
biplane. Banking to the right, about to head to the slopes of Kilimanjaro, the
dying man is rewarded with a privileged view of the savannah biome with its
ancient migration routes and game trails:
the camp beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the
bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and
there was a new water that he had never known of. The zebra, small rounded backs
now, and the wildebeeste, big- headed dots seeming to climb as they moved in long
fingers across the plain, now scattering as the shadow came toward them, they were tiny
now, and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see, grey-yellow
now and ahead old Compie's tweed back and the brown felt hat.

This death hallucination is a final, libidinal fulfillment of the landscape

satisfaction the self in the story has been desiring all along. In Hemingway’s
exquisite irony, death gives Harry the fully embodied version of the landscape,
replete with a full view of the movement of migratory animals. It also delivers a
last secret: of a watering hole that he had not know of before.

Hemingway’s savannah Africa is a mise en scene that explores the fantasy of the
recovering self, the senses taught and straining again. This coincides, ironically,
with the moment of gender segregation and death. It is one of the fullest
exemplars of a kinaesthetic longing that pervades the writing about game
reserve landscape experience East Africa and South Africa throughout the
twentieth century, and which is insufficiently understood.

One significant consequence of viewing African savannah reserves in terms of

the kinaesthetic experience of tourists, administrators, and even African
migrants, is that a newly comparative sensory history starts to emerge. In the
fullest sense, therefore, for a game reserve to be raised up to the status of a
“national” landscape, it seems it has to function within the logic of longing and
renewal. In early twentieth century tourist diaries, newspaper accounts, and
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autobiographical descriptions of visits to the Kruger National Park, we find

subjects defining the value of their experience not simply in terms of
authenticity, but also in the sense that the landscape is able to embody
ontologically satisfying experiences and the renewal of sensory acuity.
Most visitors to the Kruger National Park thought of themselves as travelling
back in time, away from the city and its modernity. Novelist Ethelreda Lewis., for
instance, describes Kruger as “A place of ancient stillness streaked by many
rivers flowing in primeval beauty.” It is at dawn and dusk that this primitive
quality is communicated directly to the viewer. As evening approaches, even
antelope appear to become pensive, “perhaps touched with that strange
‘Hesperian depression’ which affects not only man and ape at the twilight hour,
but other animals” (November 16 1929).

In such descriptions, the managed bushveld environment enables the visitor to

revert to a different spatio-temporal experience: instead of the day defined by
the rhythms of work, more primitive emotions are evoked, where the dying of
the light triggers a far wider range of responses, from mature depression to
slight fear, and the dawn is full of joy, as though one were able to inhabit, for a
brief time, an older, pre-modern subjectivity attuned to the nuances of the
environment. Seen from a moving car, Kruger allows a naive sort of wish
fulfilment, becoming “a place where the whole picture books of childhood come
true at last”. This childlike pleasure has its origins in visual proximity, in animals
being presented for close visual inspection. Looked at with new intensity,
creatures like giraffe appear to move in another world of time and space: “that
soft, gigantic, fascinating canter which is like an optical illusion.” “If your car goes
quietly,” Lewis continues, “you will get near enough to see that in the folds of the
skin of the neck perch tick birds.”
Early enthusiasts like Ethelreda Lewis knew virtually nothing of game spotting
strategies or animal identification. Because many of them were unsure of what to
expect, they often followed the advice offered in The Outspan of 1930: “There is . .
. the difficulty of spotting isolated animals that blend with their surroundings;
and many visitors would find it worth while to employ a native as a look-out
man” (5 December 1930, 81). We have only the derogatory European nicknames
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for these shadowy professionals. The first Boy Scout visits from Barberton, for
instance, relied on “a police boy rejoicing in the name of Grindstone”, whereas
Stephenson-Hamilton’s wife to be, Hilda Cholmondeley, was escorted by “a
faithful police boy, ‘Office’ as we called him”. The indefatigable Edith Prance, in
Three Weeks in Wonderland, hires a servant “for the rough work of car and
camp,” and promptly renames him: “His name being ‘Pencil’, I forthwith dubbed
him ‘Fountain Pen’, ‘Typewriter’ seeming a little too modern!” (3).
Given the banter and derisory jokes about “police boys”, it is easy to overlook
the fact that Africans were not simply camp help to early white tourists. There is
in fact a major obsession with “native life” in the Kruger National Park, and in
many tourist accounts it is clear that the experience of proximity to “raw natives”
was a crucial aspect of enjoyment for whites. African spotters and camp servants
helped to structure the relatively unstructured desires of white visitors of
different classes, and thus a motor tour to the Kruger National Park involved the
experience of travelling back into a progressively more archaic domain of time
and labour. Surrounding, the Reserve, too, and in some senses preparing the
visitor for it, was a domain of “tribal” experience making up “a defined route
through . . . the native location, game reserves, scenery, and other interests” (The
Star 1928). Thus the passage from the distant city, to pre-modern South Africa,
and then to the archaic labour relations of Kruger, was an integral part of the
functioning of the Lowveld landscape allegory. By 1958, Afrikaans writers were
describing this journey as a sort of pilgrimage to recover the heart of the Nation’s
past, proximity to God, and to his primal imprint in Nature and the cycles of the
bushveld dawn and dusk:
Met die werke van sy hande het die mens homself toegebou. In sy stede, dorpe
en selfs op sy plase omring sy handewerk hom in so `n mate dat die maan nie meer
uit `n polsende oerwout van lewe en dood verrys nie, maar slegs flou skemer deur
`rookwolk tussen skoorstene; sodat die son nie meer die lumier in `n gloed van rooi
en goud aankondig nie, maar slegs `n nuwe werksdag om meer geld te maak. . . . Dit
is om hierdie rede dat die volk van Suid Afrika jaar na jaar, asof op `n pelgrimstog, die
grootpad na die Krugerwildtuin vat (Labuschagne 63-64).

The Kruger National Park, in this comparative historical understanding,

“reserves” a particular order of time: enlightened modern range management
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combined with the best remnant traces of the pre-industrial past. It is at the
heart of time fantasies of Euro-American modernism. With the proliferation of
Fordist work regimes, global modernity expresses an intense, compensatory
longing for ‘reserved’ spaces where remnants of archaic value are to be found.
Hemingway’s Kilimanjaro, Lawrences’s Taos, the Reservation in Huxley’s Brave
New World, van der Post’s Kalahari, are all examples of these enclaved domains .

A comparative kinaesthetics of game reserve experience would also have to take

into account the sense of embodied belonging, or alienation, recalled by
residents or frequent migrants for whom the reserve was also a kind of home.
We will approach this through a different hermeneutic, that of the ontological
meaning of fences and borders, later in our discussion.

4. The Museum Outdoors

The Kruger National Park in the 1930s was a bounded space that preserved not
only animals, but also an older order of labor relation (Figure 3). Gate guards and
‘police boys’ were a crucial part of the early tourist experience in the Kruger
National Park.

Shangaan gate guards play an important role with regard to the modernization of
colonial consciousness. They dramatize two orders of time and racial identity –
one that of the ‘improved’ native and the other that of the customary, ethnic
collective – that cannot easily coexist outside the boundaries of the reserve. Their
clothing therefore exemplifies work for the Other as much as for the self, and in
fact it might be said that the rigid pose adopted by these men in tourist
photographs is an internalization of the camera’s gaze, rather than any sign of
loyalty. ‘The pose,’ says Kaja Silverman, ‘needs to be more generally understood
as the photographic imprinting of the body.’ ‘It may be the result,’ she suggests,
‘of a projection of a particular image onto the body so repeatedly as to induce
both a psychic and a corporeal identification with it’ (1992: 205).

The idea that older relations of production persist on the colonial periphery in
forms of fetishistic devotion is central to the Lugardian understanding of native
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administration. As we know, it was a crucial aspect of Shepstone’s administration

of despotic rule in Natal, and it is repeated in the understanding of the first
warden of the Kruger National Park, James Stevenson- Hamilton. What
Stevenson-Hamilton wanted to achieve in Kruger was a Reserve space that
preserved animals and particular kinds of native subject. ‘I would like to point
out,’ he says in his Warden’s Annual Report of 1929, ‘{that} whereas our natives
are always civil and obliging to Europeans, those living along the Crocodile River
especially close outside our borders are just the reverse, and seem permeated
with political propaganda’ (p. 4). The south- western edge of the Kruger National
Park is a moralized, imaginative border, a pareragon associated with half-
modernized native subjects under the care of the warden; just beyond this
invisible boundary the older bonds of fealty are shrugged off and a new order of
familiarity between boss and servant associated with the modern state starts to
appear. The increasing loss of respect for benevolent white administration was
most noticeable at the trials of poachers: ‘When caught and tried in Court,’ the
warden noted, ‘they display far more erudition and cleverness than was the case
some years ago’ (p. 4).

What Stevenson-Hamilton was encountering indirectly was the effect in the

1930s of political mobilization by the early Industrial and Commercial Union in
the Bushbuckridge region. Questions of native rights may be managed by game
wardens as long as they are framed in particular transitional spaces that
mediate between different temporal orders: in Kruger, modern rights therefore
appear to emerge slowly, but not at the expense of older forms of pre-capitalist
value, or ‘custom,’ and not as a condition brought about through obvious African
political agency. Outside the spatial frame, as in the abstract space of the
lawcourts, the contradictions become destructively sharp.

Places like colonial game reserves and mission stations are an example of how
the ‘disjunctive temporalities of modernity’ are translated into ‘the discourse of
space’ (Bhabha 1994: 251) so that they do not appear as contradictions. One of
the best explanations of this process is still to be found in the work of John and
Jean Comaroff. ‘Hegemony,’ they say in an early work, ‘is that part of a dominant
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ideology that has been naturalized and, having contrived a tangible world in its
image, does not appear to be ideological at all’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:
29). Ideology and hegemony, in other words, are part of one system, with the
latter being that domain of signs and practices in which the ‘agentive’ mode has
become invisible (p. 28).

Q The question to be posed, then, in a comparative manner, is what other

forms of ethnic subject function in the game reserve landscapes of early
modernism to help “smooth out” the vicious temporalities of modernity. How
might this apply in a reading of the Maasai? Is this a function generally of
the “pastoral power” of Indirect Rule?

5. On the Thickness of the Fence

For the past fifteen years or so, I have been working on issues of land claims
against and oral historical accounts of protected areas in southern Africa. Many
of these accounts are derived from interviews I conducted in rural Venda, and
with communities on the edge of the extreme south west of the Kruger National
Park.

The small group of black rangers who lived for many years near Pretoriuskop in
the Kruger National Park has taught me a great deal about border identities in
general. A catastrophe was visited upon them in 1939, long before the Park was
fenced, when veterinary measures taken against the spread of foot and mouth
disease resulted in all of their cattle being shot. Out of nowhere, it seemed,
veterinary health authorities descended upon the region, systematically culling all
cloven-hoofed animals. Cows that had been known by individual praise names were
shot, and their carcasses summarily dumped into mass graves. When interviewed
some sixty years later, eighty year old Nkayinkayi Samuel Mavundla still vividly
recalled the sound of the gunfire on that day, and the utter destruction of the
community’s meager wealth.

Early the next year, the Chief Native Commissioner for the Northern Areas recounted
how in the Kruger National Park “some 1200 cattle belonging to its Native population
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 14

of some 2000 souls [have] . . . been slaughtered to establish a cattle free zone between
Portuguese territory and the Transvaal”30 Significantly, Warden Stevenson-Hamilton
vigorously opposed the culling measures. In response to his outraged claim that
Africans in the Park were in danger of starving, and that there would be a sharp
increase in child mortality, the Commissioner authorized the Warden to purchase a
single case of condensed milk for emergency supplies! A 1960s Commission of
Inquiry into the control of foot-and-mouth disease reported that in Kruger itself, in the
1939 campaign, 1313 head of cattle, 321 sheep and goats, and 6 pigs were killed; in
the neighbouring Crocodile River district alone, however, where the poorest of
peasant African farmers lived, almost 14 000 animals were shot.

The shock association of this animal holocaust with the idea of lost heritage is
registered strongly in all the contemporary oral histories, often in a significantly
confused form. But there is a more general reason for the seeming inaccuracy of
community memory. To this day, in the broad region including the south western
areas of the Kruger National Park, the combined effects of impoverishment,
community fragmentation, migrancy, and ecological catastrophe, have produced a
general sense of malaise so profound that it has attached itself to notions of landscape,
all but severing the relationship between ontology and habitus: it has effectively
disrupted what Derrida has called “ontopology,” or “the axiomatics linking
indissociably the ontological value of present-being to its situation, to the stable and
presentable determination of a locality.”32 Given the generalised and unlocated sense
of absence that still prevails, it is not surprising to find youth reaching for some
originary historical moment responsible for the collapse of the symbolic order.
Throughout the region, in interviews over the past years, I have found youth
associating cattle massacres with the origins of economic and affective disaster, and
linking these with the mound graves they knew about in the Kruger National Park. On
closer inspection, though, these narratives also turn out to be about spatiality. Cattle,
in the memory of residents, were a means by which meaning travelled and value was
inscribed through localised movement. The historical loss of cattle wealth helped to
explain their own present sense of being stranded, outside of the main currents of
history.
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 15

Youths like Philemon Ngomane also frequently mistook the timing and sequence of
events leading up to the cattle genocide: for them, it was understood not as a pre-War
event, but was rather associated with 1970s apartheid, the directly traumatizing period
within their own generational experience. Broadly, these animal deaths were also
indistinctly associated with the loss of land in the Kruger National Park, and they and
others referred back to their knowledge of topograpical markers in the Reserve,
including regularly visited ancestral graves.

While the work of “landscape” aesthetics is to smooth over the shocks, the processes
of displacement and interdiction seem to undermine this.

Cattle, in the early years, were mobile signifiers associated with the permeable border.
It is through my work on cattle in game reserves that I have become interested more
generally in the ontology of fencing. There is in fact very little of any value about
fences in the new environmental histories. (Two works stand out, however: Sean
Archer history of Karoo fencing, and Isabel Hofmeyr visionary work on boundaries
and oral history.)

For some time now, I have been studying the history of border fencing in the
southwestern Kruger National Park, and the effects of fencing on the Phabene
community.
Fencing controls against foot-and-mouth disease that followed in the 1950s and 60s
meant that all free movement between the Park and surrounding Reserves was
eventually cut off. This was a process of slow strangulation. Section by section, the
border zone became an area of interdiction. Foot-and-mouth, as is well known,
requires a highly regimented system of spatial control, proscription, and disinfection,
involving the blockading of movement, and a complex system of dipping and
spraying of animals, trucks, bicycles, and feet to prevent the spread of the acutely
infectious virus which is present not only in the vesicles in animal mouths and on feet,
but may also be subject to airborne transmission.

Disease control, as Foucault famously demonstrated, requires a segmenting and

compartmentalizing of space, and a bureaucratic definition of the subject.37 Consider
this: in 1940, because of the loss of draught animals, Albasini residents applied for
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 16

permission to use donkeys in place of oxen for ploughing the fields to grow
subsistence crops. Donkeys are reluctant servants at best. Far less maize was
produced, and so residents had to supplement their store with bags of ground meal
purchased from Hazyview station. But to get the maize, they had to use the donkeys
as transport, and to move the donkeys through the border zone, they had to apply in
writing for a veterinary services official to meet them at the border to wash the
animals’ hooves. The application process itself took weeks. So the spatial interdiction
is supplemented by a swarming of bureaucratic authority that is brought to bear on
citizens in the zone.

In the memory of elders I interviewed, there was a utopian time before the erection of
the western veterinary fence when, as one put it, “large animals like kudu would
sometimes come home with [the] cattle.”38 Foot-and-mouth changed everything. With
the closure of the western veterinary fences, an epoch of zonal understanding came to
an end. Until then, many Africans were in a sense citizens of the blurred border, able
to live within the very thickness of the line drawn on the map. With the staggered
arrival of sections of fence, existing forms of class and gender asymmetry became
exaggerated. Some communities benefited from continued access to the resources of
the Park, while others were blocked completely. Overnight, the ability to enforce
poaching laws in certain areas was massively enhanced. It was around this time, his
widow told us, that Nkayinkayi Mavundla caught his own brother coming through the
fence at Hazyview station and was forced to arrest him as a poacher.
Because the staggered introduction of fencing in the 1950s and 60s privileged certain
groups and not others, it closely mirrored changing apartheid government attitudes
towards forms of chiefly rule. In the 1950s, government surveyors attempted to
produce a rough sketch map of areas of chiefly control in the region. (Fig. 3:
Surveyor’s Sketch Map of Tribal Authority in the Nsikazi District.) Glancing at
these charts, it may be immediately observed that the Board felt itself to be dealing
with the territorial authority of three chiefs: Chief Jacob Mdluli, in the immediate area
of Numbi and Pretoriuskop; Chief Mphunzane Mhaule, in the zone stretching
alongside the Park north of the Mdluli area up to the Sabie River; and Chief Joseph
Masoyi. By now, in other words the easy regional administration of the Stevenson-
Hamilton epoch had given way to a more specific form of tribalised, chief-based
control. African employees in the border zone had dual citizenship, determined first
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 17

by National Parks Board authority, and secondly, by the imaginary authority of

compliant chiefs in the neighboring Native Reserves destined to be incorporated into
the Kangwane “homeland.”39 In the Skukuza archives, there are comprehensive
records of returns for squatter’s rent, and, each of the 30 to 50 heads of household in
the Albasini group is listed as being employed by the National Parks Board and as
owing allegiance to one of the three Chiefs. In the very acts of division that
determined the western boundary of the game reserve, in other words, may be found
the shadow of a changing, generalized system of native administration.
Segmented closure of the western border also meant that other rights of local citizens
could finally be denied. Traditional rights to river bank property—such as access to
the Nsikazi river—were finally blocked: since the Park now defined its borders on the
far bank of rivers, the new fences were the beginning of the end of access to water for
animals owned by Africans. This had not always been the case. The original
legislation defined boundaries at midstream, and for Stevenson-Hamilton in the
1920s, this meant that the rivers, too, were a completely indistinct zone of control. “A
boundary taken at midstream,” he argued, “at least so far as the lowveld rivers are
concerned, with their numerous reed covered and wooded islets, their densely reed
fringed banks, and hidden channels, is in practice no boundary at all.”

Q How does one write the history of specialized, border identities, of

communities and individuals who live the “thickness” of the fence by taking
advantage of its legal ambiguities?

5. On “National” Fences
By the 1960s, the topographical violence of apartheid could no longer be ignored by
visitors to the Kruger National Park. Rural reserves had given way to massive
resettlements in the so-called “Released Areas” of the Nsikazi district, and these were
the beginning of the next phase of apartheid spatial control: the construction of
“Bantustan” separate states that would in future rob Africans of their South African
citizenship. These displacements began to impinge directly on the experience of
tourists approaching the Numbi gate. White farmers in the area reacted hysterically to
the increasing numbers of resettled Africans. In 1966, the Southern Low Veld
Farmers’ Union wrote a sharp letter to the Secretary for Bantu Administration, in
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 18

which it claimed that “many fine scenic drives are being spoilt by what [may be
described] as “SHANTY TOWNS.”41 Interestingly, the writer claims that “in the case
of the Transkei, these villages add rather than detract from the countryside.” The
approach road, in other words, is understood to play out, progressively, an allegory of
the evolution of different forms of racialised control, culminating in the natural
management system of the Kruger National Park itself. For that reason, the writer
says, “the picture should present . . . one of careful planning under the guidance of
European supervisors.” To maintain this allegorised approach, through different,
symbolically defined zones of landscape heritage, a more radical form of spatial
management became necessary. By late 1966, most argued that a second fence was
necessary, joining the Kruger Park western boundary at a right-angle. One vehement
proponent of the new fence described it as follows: “dit ‘n heining van Nasionale
belang is aangesien dit die skeiding tussen Blanke- en Bantoe gebied vorm” [“It is a
fence of National importance, given the fact that it will form the boundary between
White and Bantu districts”].42

In the end, an absurd compromise between hard and soft boundaries was reached. In a
letter commenting on “Scenic Motor Drives in the Eastern Transvaal,” the Bantu
Affairs Commissioner at Bushbuckridge describes how 500 000 papaya trees have
been grown, “and will be issued to the Bantu in these residential areas to be planted in
their stands.”43 In a massive intervention that marks the inextricable connection
between aesthetics and power, the state arranged for the Numbi access road to Kruger
to be fringed by a dense screen of tropical trees which softened the visual impact of
the settlements. This may also have been a way of managing the metonymic
relationship between landscape and time: the homeland resettlement areas were the
final, brutal conclusion of a racist attempt to sequester forms of modernised black
citizenship in controllable zones. Unlike other modernizing states, however, white
South Africa did not conceive of black citizenship within the reconceived boundaries
of the nation state as a whole. For that reason, the allegorical transition from
Johannesburg, to the homelands, with their separate, sequestered forms of racialised
citizenship, and then to the Kruger National Park, was also a passage through several
contradictory zones of time, until the encounter with timeless, spatialised aspects of
native being in the game reserve itself. For this critical narrative to survive the spatial
contradictions of grand apartheid, it became increasingly necessary to bracket off the
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 19

catastrophic time of the Bantustans, and to spatialise them and aestheticise them with
a decorative tropical screen. For landscape heritage to survive, in other words, it
required a second fence.

It is worth noting, by the way, that within a year of their being planted, every single
one of the papaya trees was dead or dying, for there was not enough water to sustain
them or the communities who were forced to carry tins of the precious liquid to try
and save them. The State then grew new seedlings, replanted half a million
replacement trees, and provided more available irrigation. There is a lesson for all
cultural historians that hides in this image of the withering groves: the national fence
signals the full extension of Kruger’s western boundary into the logic of the state.
Even in this final metamorphosis, however, the contending authorities were unified
in their understanding that the success of any border resides not only in its ability to
barricade, but also in the way that it is able to naturalize its control.

7. On Fire in the 1950s

My very rough discussion thus far has pointed to how it is necessary to think of
“game reserves” as landscapes managed for particular chronotypical forms. The
time of the “reserve”, in other words, stands in a strong relationship to the
seesawing time of modernist cities and production cycles. Both management of
these systems, and tourist perception of their proper management, emphasise
the smoothing out of the time regimens, so that the reserve forms a
compensatory buffer to the kinds of shock being experienced as contradiction
elsewhere.

We have see how this combination of aesthetic and population management

works with respect to Africans in the landscape, with their “cattle complex,” and
the preference on the part of managers for an older order of feudal fealty. Some
of the same principles of time and aesthetics are strongly present in the
management of top-down drivers in the reserve, and most especially fire.

Savannah biomes are fire-driven systems. Around the world, savanna biomes,
which occupy about 20% of the land surface of the earth and 40% of Africa [Van
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 20

Wilgen 2000] are defined by the dynamic relationship between grasses and
trees. These ecosystems vary over time with respect to changes in rainfall
(producing variable fuel loads of dry grass in the next season), herbivory, and
fires.

But this is not how fire in game reserves is perceived by the public at large. In 1996,
two years after the first democratic elections in South Africa brought an African
National Congress government to power, there were huge conflagrations in the
Kruger National Park. From September to October of that year, large sections of
the southern area of the reserve were aflame. Managers initially claimed that
conditions were extremely unusual, leading to exaggerated burning effects.
According to some estimates (Van Wilgen 2000), the burning index exceeded 50
on three days and was very high for the whole period. Fuel loads (in excess of
3500 kg per hectare) were very high, because of high rainfall the previous year,
but these conditions are actually quite often encountered every 7 to 12 years.

As large sections of the Park burned, in areas of high tourist density, there was a
public outcry at what was perceived to be mismanagement by the post-apartheid
conservation managers. Travelling through the southern area that year, I read
the visitor comment books in most of the major camps. Prominent in all of them
were outraged statements about fires out of control, sweeping across the
landscape. One comment in particular remains with me as an index of the
emotional overinvestment: “Julle het die hele plek afgebrand. Nou kan julle dit
teruggee vir die kaffirs” [“You have burnt the whole place to a cinder. You might
as well now just give it back to the niggers.”]

Why is there such an intense response to these events, if fire is a recurrent and
necessary savanna phenomenon? What especially is it in the historical
conditions of the time that produces such exaggerated emotional investment? To
understand the shift, we have to go back to a genealogy of fire management
regimens in Kruger.
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 21

Most biologists distinguish 6 major shifts in Kruger’s fire management policy. In

the first period of Stevenson-Hamilton’s rule of the new national park, from 1926
to 1947, when his chosen successor was forced to step down, there was very
little fire control at all. Occasional and very limited burning was conducted, and
only to produce grazing for game. This laissez-faire approach to “veld
management” is a direct outgrowth of the balance-of-nature thesis that Hamilton
and others began to adhere to in the period. At the same time, it is also tied to
wider and globally prevalent “degradation” narratives of the 1920s, associating
loss of topsoil and increasing erosion with the unimproved farming practices or
rural Africans, and their “irrational” overstocking of cattle. Betterment schemes
fed into a general rhetoric in favour of water provision, lowering stocking rates,
and the prevention of veld fires (Maddox 2002). The link was made explicitly in
the Drought Investigation Commission report of 1926, which stated that “veld
burning is contrary to the interests of the country as well as to the principles of
all veld and soil conservation”.v

When the new management regime associated with apartheid South Africa took
over forcibly after the second World War, a stronger link was made between
game reserve veld management and farming practices. As I have argued
elsewhere, there is a strong isomorphism between the changing landscape
practices in Kruger and conscious and unconscious Afrikaner nationalist
attempts to purge the Kruger Park of its older, English amateur naturalism. This
included, first and foremost, a connection between the imagined landscape of the
lowveld, early Voortrekker narratives, and the lost pastoral world of Afrikaner
farms of the 1930s. Voerwoerd, grand architect of apartheid in the 1960s,
routinely referred to Kruger as his “plaas”.

By the 1950s, the strong association between farm heterotopias and game
reserves expressed itself in management practices in Kruger being influenced by
agricultural sciences. Prominent amongst the new sciences of landscape
management were conceptions of stocking rates (“carrying capacity”) and
scientific veld burning. From 1957 onwards, the Kruger National Park
introduced an entirely new regime of fire management, focussed on regular
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 22

prescribed burning, when the first rains fell every Spring, in precisely delineated
blocks each of about 4000 hectares.

MAP BURNING BLOCKS

As a national landscape, therefore, the look of the Kruger National Park was
radically transformed from 1957 onwards: to visit this savanna environment, as
a South African tourist, was to inevitably encounter evidence of strong, hard
edged management, visible in the 400 burning blocks demarcated by firebreaks,
in which intense, managed fires were allowed to burn [van Wilgen 2004]. The
look of the Park, in other words, is the look of science written in ash. [Map of
burn blocks.] Unlike the older amateur logics of pastoral care, the new regimen
was a prime example of “stable state” theory focussed on providing the optimum
grazing and browsing conditions for large mammals in the game reserve (van
Wilgen 2004). What was not realised at the time, was that “ring burning”
methods (where there is uniform ignition around the whole block) produce
headfires of exaggerated intensity, moving with the wind and incinerating trees
that might otherwise have withstood more localized and patchy traumatisation
[van Wilgen 2004].

In the decade preceding the end of apartheid, a period characterised by intense

levels of violence and mass resistance throughout the country, a more flexible
system of burning was introduced to this savanna park. Timing of prescribed
fires was now determined by a more complex system of evaluation for each burn
block: fuel loads, post fire age of vegetation, and mean annual rainfall were taken
into account [van Wilgen 2004]. In general, this was an attempt to produce a
more variable landscape of fire effects, with greater attendant variety in the
ecosystems. This led, in turn, to an even more radical proposal: that prescriptive
burning should cease, and a new regimen of “natural” fire be introduced.

The short period (from 1992 to 2001) in which Kruger experimented with
“natural” fire policy is one of the most interesting, in political terms, in the park’s
history. From now on, the only fires to be to be tolerated, or even encouraged,
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 23

were those produced by natural lightning strikes. What followed was an

extremely arduous period for game and field rangers, who were forced to fight
every blaze deemed not to be of natural origin.

Thus it is that in the very lead up to the end of apartheid, and the transition to
democratic government, the Kruger Park was struggling both to accommodate
reference to neighbouring communities (it established community forums and a
new division of Social Ecology in the 1990s), and yet to exclude completely the
influence of anthropogenic fires. To give a sense of the scale of this difficulty,
Biggs and van Wilgen estimate that of the 757, 660 hectares of veld burned in
this period, 90% of the fires were caused by refugees and small-scale poachers
crossing the park.

Some aspects of the history of fire practices by refugees are emerging in the oral
history interviews we are conducting in our project on East-West movement in
the Park.

We may now return, with renewed insight, to the racist remarks made about fire
management in 1996. The comments in the Skukuza visitors’ book are indicative
of an older episteme of deep emotional and political attachment to the idea of
proper landscape management, exemplified in the aesthetics of the controlled
burn. These attachments have as much to do with the perception of strong game
reserve managers as a kind of military authority, a perception reinforced by the
previous decade in which conservation managers were deeply implicated in the
practice of the war in neighbouring Mozambique. They have everything, as well,
to do with conceptions of a “stable state” of race in the last years of apartheid.

Most recent changes in fire policy in Kruger are a direct reflection of wider,
epistemic shifts. First amongst these has been the impact of ecosystem theory
upon conservation biology. With its new focus on the conservation of
biodiversity, rather than large mammals (the older “game reserve” logic), the
comprehensively revised management policy for the Kruger National Park
aligned itself with a major global change in understanding. Key to this
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 24

understanding is a focus on disequilibrium, rather than stable states, and on

chance, patchiness, and heterogeneity in savannas. Tracking that understanding,
new fire policies use careful, strategic monitoring of fuel loads and rainfall
patterns to determine burn quotas (within variable thresholds) for section
rangers. Built in to the “point ignition” system is a degree of randomness,
allowing, some say, for the encouragement of more heterogeneous landscape
mosaics.

As these new landscape management systems emerge, debates rage around the
underlying science: already here are significant questions are being raised about
the relationship between “pyrodiversity and biodiversity” (van Wlgen 2009).
Moreover, as necessary as managed burning is to the health of the contained
savanna system, the public is still heavily invested in the aesthetics and politics
of conservation landscapes. Managers ignore this at their peril.

Ashy ground is at the centre of this investment. At the time of writing this rough
draft, some friends and I who work in Kruger had been intrigued to see the
impact of a new hypothesis on fire landscapes that emerged in the Kruger
Networks meeting this year. Leading savanna biologist William Bond gave a
startling account of the need to take heed of the history of “firestorm” events in
African savanna landscapes. These are widely spaced episodes, when weather,
wind, humidity, and fuel load is sufficient to produce massive burns that clear
whole areas of tree and brush populations. These, Bond argues, are key,
unacknowledged drivers of savannas, and he challenged scientists to investigate
them.

Before we left Kruger for the United States recently, Melissa McHale, Laurence
Kruger and I had been talking about how managers and fire ecologists would
pursue the firestorm idea. It turns out now that the first experiment has had
massive public opinion consequences. On 15 September this year, fire ecologist
Navashni Govender set a high intensity fire in conditions designed to produce the
“firestorm effect”. The resultant, massive burn was carefully contained, but of
such a scale operators of the NASA Advanced Land Imager satellite chose that it
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 25

as image of the day. Govender offered a clear and reasoned account of the burn:
the NASA site follows her in explaining how “most tree and bush species in the
savannas are adapted to fire, so conventional low-intensity fires do little to
reduce the woody vegetation. Park managers had to find another solution to
maintain open grasslands.”

NASA’s Earth Observatory site displays a beautiful image of the gigantic

controlled burn. Unfortunately, Park managers had not taken sufficient account
of the public response to the experiment, and of the prospect of burned and
dying “charismatic megafauna” such as rhino staggering onto the tourist roads.
Here are two comments about the event left on public blog sites:

1. “This appears to be "uncontrolled burning" and has absolutely nothing

to do with bush or wildlife management! The injuries to those animals is
cruelty, and there is no other reasonable [reason for] what happened.
Where once South African Wildlife and Game Experts led the field, they
must now hang their heads in shame! The World is watching.”

2. You can't intervene in nature half way, start a fire, and then when
things go wrong say that nature must take its course. That's simply
irrational. A prime example of cognitive dissonance and the confirmation
bias - justifying our irrational choices! Shame on SANParks and Kruger
National Park for this disastrous event and shame on Thakuli for
arrogantly treating the public like idiots! You guys messed up BAD! Admit
it. Apologize. Then we can all move on. Otherwise this event will fester in
our minds like the wounds on the poor unassisted rhinos!

The same patterns repeat themselves, with the same overinvestment.

8. Thresholds (Of Potential Concern)

When I started working on the history of the KNP, it was from the perspective of
a skeptical poststructuralist. I had had some difficult times in Kruger, from being
treated as an outsider to having military files disappear from the archive under
my nose.

The KNP is still a hierarchical kingdom, but I have become much more
sympathetic to what is being done there, which is quite radical and visionary,
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 26

though lacking in other respects where the social sciences and humanities have a
critical role to play. I have been suggesting, throughout my research, that there is
an isomorphic relationship between the state, and the state of nature, and that in
consequence, the epochal shifts between management strategies can be related
more generally to changes in governance and conceptions of citizenship writ
large.

That’s all very well. But by the same logic, there is no reason to suspect that this
should not still be the case in the present.

Is this still the case?

There has been a revolutionary paradigmatic shift in the Conservation

Management philosophy in South African National Parks. This shift was brought
about not only because of careful introspection and self-reflection, but also
because of the emerging implications of research into river catchment areas.

Contemporary management statements are much more hesitant than they ever
were before:

We accept that many decisions

taken today will be challenged by future
managers and scientists, and we expect that some
will be found wanting as emerging knowledge and
continued learning shape future decisions. Further,
evolving political, social, and environmental contexts
may mean that protected areas will need to be
managed in different ways. Therefore, we emphasize
the importance of minimizing the permanency
and impact of decisions so that today‘s actions do
not compromise future decisions when meaningful
changes need to be made. (Venter, Biggs et al)

Most significantly, current management policy strives towards integrating biophysical

and social systems, concentrating on determining ecosystem scale consequences for
all management decisions. Central to this new policy, are the maintenance of
heterogeneity and biodiversity. As one synoptic statement put it: the Kruger National
Park has now “embraced the paradigm that spatial and temporal heterogeneity at the
landscape scale imparts environmental vitality for the long term”.
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 27

The centrality of these key terms in management policy relates to a growing global
awareness, under pressure of climate change, of the importance of biodiversity for the
resilience of all environmental systems.

The basic premise is that if a variety of natural landscapes,

structures and communities are accommodated and
vary over space and time, that this variation itself
will be the best safeguard for maintaining biodiversity,
the key mandate of South African National
Parks (SANParks).

This has meant, in turn, that many of the landscape management systems that I have
spoken about in the past as being isomorphic of wider ideological meaning have been
eliminated: the command and control logic of block burning, and the agricultural and
farming language of carrying capacity, have been replaced by patch burning; artificial
water points have been closed; and a new system of elephant management has been
developed.

Overall the management of this newly conceived complex system is conducted

through the maintenance of monitoring devices:

Adaptive management permeates ways in which

KNP science, monitoring and management attempts
to strategically reach heterogeneity (and
hence biodiversity) goals via so-called ‘thresholds
of potential concern‘ or TPCs (Biggs and Rogers
2003). TPCs are defined as a compatible and well articulated
set of adaptive management goals and
endpoints, each of which is:
_ a level of concern to monitor;
_ a hypothesis to examine and revise;
_ a trace-back to a particular agent of ecosystem
change;
_ an achievable environmental goal

In turn, that has meant too that the focus has shifted from containment of the
conservation area in a steady state, to negotiation with external elements.

Strategic Adaptive Management has its origins in the difficult process of finding
consensus between constituencies competing for river access to the major
perennial rivers flowing through Kruger. In 1997, Kruger authorities embarked
on a series of public and workshop discussions to try and determine consensus
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 28

on a “desired state” for the park, focusing on questions of “biodiversity, human

benefits, and wilderness”. Significantly, the parameters were later expanded to
include issues of cultural heritage and “constituency building”. The end result
was the current “thresholds” monitoring system, and the overall zonation of the
park. The management policy document also reveals that the philosophy of
desired states defined by thresholds, “owes its origin to the Kruger National
Park Rivers Research Programme which, during the nineties, had taken on the
beleaguered cause of the perennial rivers flowing through Kruger and whose
headwaters are all outside the park.”

Developing out of the Rivers Research program, Strategic Adaptive Management

is a widely acclaimed, and significant adaptation to the problem of managing
dynamic systems. Philosophically, it exemplifies a global shift in conservation
management “from a model of a relatively static system with variations around
an equilibrium, toward one where the ecosystem flux and pattern are seen as
complex, non-linear, often unpredictable and adaptive” (Biggs et al).

Certainly within this new model, the issues surrounding the management of
elephants represent one of the most significant problems. Zonation
thresholds manifest themselves in the following way:

MAP OF ELEPHANT MANAGEMENT ZONES

Across the complex ecosystem, in other words, a series of nested zonation plans
sequester particular forms of activity, biodiversity conservation management,
and landscape effect. Overall, as well, there are homological relations between
Kruger as a complex ecosystem, and Kruger as a zoned combination of semi-
autonomous business districts.

The relative autonomy of zones in Kruger, with thresholds of potential concern

established for keystone species in each area, allows for the management of risk.
In the imagination of management, this holds as much for the control of elephant
populations (varying between zones of vulnerability, where numbers are kept
Please do not cite or circulate; for workshop discussion only 29

low) as it does for camp managers within the Park, tasked with the business of
making each “business unit” profitable. There are, in other words, strong
homologies between the manner in which neo-liberal business sequesters and
manages risk, and the argument around flexible responses to dynamic ecosystem
change in savanna landscapes.

I will simply leave you with this question: if we have built a comparative
understanding of savanna protected areas which draws connections between
epochs of national government, and epochs of management, what is the current
state of these connections? To what extent has the decline of the state and the
rise of corporate governance become integrated into the ways in which
managers deal with protected area landscapes. To what extent does the risk
management rhetoric of neo-liberal business practice manifest itself in
partnerships between conservation agencies (WWF, IUCN) and local
conservation managers.
i
Surprisingly, where one might have expected reference to trends in environmental history
influenced by say subaltern studies, or theory-driven cultural anthropology, Carruthers seems
to be worried about the continued influence of the early work of Edward Said.
ii
See Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe, and Bill Guest, eds., South Africa’s Environmental
History: Cases and Comparisons. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.
iii
Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, Dorothy Hodson, “Once Were Intrepid
Warriors. See also Being Maasai.
iv
Landau, Patricia Hayes, Carruthers, Sea World, Rob Gordon
v
Quoted in van Wilgen (2009). Drought Investigation Commission (1926). The great drought
problem of South Africa. Journal of the Department of Agriculture, Reprint no. 16.